Who is Jonathan Braun? Trump’s Last Minute Pardon Still Faces

President Donald J. Trump’s late-night commutation of a 10-year prison sentence being served by a drug smuggler named Jonathan Braun made the action sound almost routine. The White House said only that upon his release, Mr. Braun would “seek employment to support his wife and children.”

What the White House did not mention is that Mr. Braun, a New Yorker from Staten Island who had pleaded guilty in 2011 to leading a large-scale marijuana smuggling ring, still faces both criminal and civil investigations in an entirely separate matter, and has a history of violence and threatening people.

According to lawsuits filed in June against Mr. Braun and two associates by the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, and the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Braun helped start and worked as a de facto enforcer for an operation that made predatory loans to small-business owners, threatening them with violence if they refused to pay up.

Federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan also have a continuing investigation into that operation, a person with knowledge of the investigation said Friday.

As recently as two and a half years ago, Mr. Braun was accused of throwing a man off a deck at an engagement party. Federal prosecutors said in a court proceeding that he threatened to beat a rabbi who borrowed money to renovate a preschool at his synagogue. “I am going to make you bleed,” he told the rabbi, according to court documents, adding, “I will make you suffer for every penny.”

How much Mr. Trump and his aides knew about Mr. Braun’s past and his current legal troubles is not clear. In its announcement of the pardon this week, the White House appears to have substantially overstated how much of his 10-year sentence Mr. Braun had completed, saying he had served five years when he had only reported to prison a year ago. (The White House announcement also misspelled his first name, calling him Jonathon.)

Mr. Braun’s family had told people it was willing to spend millions of dollars for lawyers and others to try to get him out of prison, according to two people who have been in contact with the family members in recent months.

No one registered under federal lobbying laws to make Mr. Braun’s case to the Trump administration, though registration would not necessarily be required for legal representation. The White House announcement of the wave of 143 pardons and commutations early Wednesday, just hours before Mr. Trump left office, did not cite anyone who had backed the commutation of Mr. Braun’s sentence.

The lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz, who represented Mr. Trump in his first impeachment trial, said he “played a very limited role” in Mr. Braun’s clemency push, “almost exclusively” advising his father about the clemency process, and was paid “a very small amount of money” for his assistance.

Mr. Dershowitz said he believed Mr. Braun’s argument for clemency was “meritorious,” because Mr. Braun…